I Brought a Red Pencil
I need to tell you something before I tell you this story. I was scared.
Not the kind of scared that looks good in hindsight. The real kind. The kind where you stand outside a spot holding a covered painting and seriously consider just going home and pretending the whole thing never happened.
My freshman year of art school I painted a portrait of Spike Lee. It was one of the first paintings I ever finished, and I was semi-proud of it in the way you are proud of early work, where you can feel something real in it before you have the language to explain what that is.
I heard he was going to be at Zellerbach Hall at UC Berkeley. Through some mentors I had kept from my time as a student athlete at College of San Mateo, people who actually had real connections to people in his orbit, I tried to arrange for him to see the painting. We worked every angle. Nothing came through. The door closed.
And I stood there thinking about going home.
But I had played wide receiver at College of San Mateo and there was something I had learned on the football field that I never stopped using. Before a big play, before the snap, before any of it is real, you visualize it. You close your eyes and you run the whole thing in your mind. Every step. Every move. How the ball comes in. What your hands do. How it ends. You rehearse it so many times in your head that when the moment arrives, some part of you has already been there.
So I closed my eyes and I ran the play.
I saw myself buying the ticket. I saw myself sitting in the audience with the painting under a flap. I saw myself getting in line for the Q&A. I saw him starting to walk off stage. I saw myself lifting the painting above the crowd. I saw him turning around. I saw him walking over. I saw him signing it.
I decided, right there, that this was the version of the story that was going to happen.
That is why I had a red pencil in my pocket. Not because I was brave. Because in my visualization I had already watched him sign the painting and I knew what color I wanted him to use.
I bought a ticket.
The event went long. When the Q&A started he was already walking off stage before I reached the front of the line. The fear came back hard right there. The voice that said it is over, it was a long shot anyway, just let it go.
And then the visualization kicked in. I had already been in this exact moment in my head a dozen times. I knew what the next move was.
I pulled the flap back. Held the painting up over everyone's heads. Called his name until he turned around.
He turned around. Walked over. Looked at the painting. Took the red pencil out of my hand. Signed it.
I put the flap back down. Put the pencil in my pocket. Walked to my car. And I honestly do not remember a single mile of the drive home. I was somewhere else entirely.
I am telling you this not to make it sound easy. It was not easy. I was a scared art student with a painting and a connection that had already fallen through. The visualization did not remove the fear. It gave me something to move toward when the fear got loud enough to make me want to quit.
That is all it needs to do.
If you are carrying something right now that you have been too scared to hold up, close your eyes first. Run the play. Decide how it ends. Then bring the red pencil.
Revels Atelier is a mentorship studio for serious artists. If this story found you at a moment when you are deciding whether to make the move, Nextgen Artists is the studio where that decision becomes something real.
